Guillotina de Saka | halfwheel

Jun 28, 2025

In 2023, Steve Saka, founder of Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust, announced that he was working on a new cigar cutter named Guillotina de Saka cutter—Spanish for Saka’s guillotine—which would feature a blade that is replaceable by the user. Saka had been developing the cutter with Luigi Lucente, a product development engineer at CigarMedics, Inc. Lucente also designed The Baller, a cigar cutter that combines aspects of both a punch cutter and a v-cutter into one product.

According to Saka, the impetus behind the Guillotina de Saka came from his experience using the Cigar Bris Tool, a single guillotine cutter with a plastic body that Drew Estate sold until mid-2000. In many ways, this cutter is the spiritual successor to the Paul Garmirian Super Sheffield Cutter, another single guillotine cutter that was developed as one man’s passion project to make the very best cutter, commercial concerns be damned.

Initially, Saka said that he had no plans to sell the cutter on a commercial basis—because the cost would be too high—and that cutters from the initial production were to be used as contest prizes and “thank you” gifts to select Dunbarton accounts. However, he changed his mind, and the final product was shown off during the 2024 PCA Convention & Trade Show, and about 1,000 cutters shi to retailers in August 2024.

The Guillotina de Saka is a single guillotine cutter made with a 420 stainless steel blade inside of a stainless steel exterior case. Design-wise, the Guillotina de Saka includes a couple of unique aspects:

Physically, the Guillotina de Saka weighs 59.4 grams while measuring 1.65 inches wide and .323 inches thick, with a total length of 2.95 inches tall when closed and 3.86 inches when fully open. The cutter is made up of two pieces that are sealed together with six small screws.

$395.

That price includes a replacement blade. Currently, it is only sold in one color choice: Cerakote OD Green.

When it comes to actually cutting a cigar, the process is about as easy as it can be: I choose which size opening I want to use and push up on the top section that the blade is attached to. This action releases the magnets holding it in place and causes the blade to pop up with a satisfying “clack” sound. As a result, the blade retreats out of body of the cutter, which in turn opens up the hole where the cigar cap goes. I then place the cap of the cigar into the opening and push the blade portion down, which forces the actual blade itself through the cap of the cigar. As the blade cuts through the cap and comes to the end of its journey, there is an audible click as the magnets engage again, signifying that the process is complete.

Interestingly, the blade of the cutter does not disappear all the way into the housing. There is about a 1.5mm gap of space left, which is designed so that the cut cap is held in place. This worked almost every single time I cut with this cutter, regardless of the size of the cap or the type of wrapper I was cutting.

The process of replacing the blade of the Guillotina de Saka is easier than I thought it would be. When the cutter is open, there’s a small tab that can be pressed down to release the blade.

I start by pulling the blade section up as far as it will go, then I push down firmly on a cut-out section to release the piece. I then pull the entire blade section entirely out of the body, being very careful to make sure the blade—which is not actually attached—does not fall anywhere. The blade is kept in place via a cutout on the handle section. To change the blade, I just pick up the old one, then place the new blade in its place. I then carefully insert the section back into the body of the cutter, making sure that the blade stays in place until I can no long hold onto it. There is a tiny “click” as the locking mechanism clicks into place, and then I know I can use the cutter like normal again.

It should also be noted that the cutters can be easily taken apart to be cleaned by removing six screws—three on each side—and pulling the two pieces of the case apart gently. Inside, you will find a spring, the blade and the top portion of the cutter, all of which can easily be put back together in very short order. Thankfully, the aforementioned magnet is attached to one of the sides of the case, so you don’t have to worry about losing it or placing it back in the proper position.

Earlier this year, CigarMedics—the company that makes the Guillotina de Saka cutter for Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust—showed off a more affordable version of the Guillotina de Saka named il Maestro. The two cutters are very similar, so much so that I wasn’t sure if they’d be any different until I actually got to use the il Maestro.

For example, both cutters include the same exact blades, which can be replaced by the user with no special tools needed. Both cutters also feature different-sized openings on each side of the case as noted above. Finally, the blade is operated in exactly the same way for both cutters as well, by pushing up on the top portion of the case, which causes the section holding the blade to pop up and reveal the opening where the cap is placed to be cut.

Having said the above, there are also some differences between them: most notably, the il Maestro has an MSRP of $124.99, less than a third of the Guillotina de Saka’s $395.

Other differences include:

However, what is not different is the performance. After cutting cigars with both cutters side-by-side, I found they perform almost identically when it comes to the quality of cuts, meaning that I had excellent results across the board, with zero major problems or wrapper damage and only a small number of minor issues, like small pieces of the wrapper being left behind after the caps were cut.

Additional Competitors

No.

There is no doubt with a price point of just under $400, the Guillotina de Saka is a very expensive cutter. Saka set out to make a cutter custom-built to his specifications, and that kind of exacting process takes time and money to achieve. It is designed and built to do one thing very, very well—cut cigars cleanly—and during my month of testing, it accomplished that task over and over again with no muss, no fuss and virtually no issues. In fact, in my opinion, Saka absolutely succeeded in his goal, and buying the Guillotina de Saka will get you one of the best single guillotine cutters on the market.

In a normal situation, that would be where my review would come to an end. However, the release of the il Maestro changes the calculous dramatically, not just because it is substantially more affordable—after all, pretty much every cigar costs less than the Guillotina de Saka—but also because that (much) more affordable price will also get you basically the same exact cuts. To me, the fact that the Guillotina de Saka looks better, feels better in my hand and has a slightly smoother operation makes it a better cutter than the il Maestro, but even I would have a hard time justifying paying the extra $270 it would take to actually buy the more expensive option. In the end, you will get great cuts no matter which choice you make, and that is not a situation that happens very often.

I have worn many hats in my life up to this point: I started out as a photojournalist for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, then transitioned to photographing weddings—both internationally and in the U.S.—for more than a decade. After realizing that there was a need for a cigar website containing better photographs and more in-depth information about each release, I founded my first cigar blog, SmokingStogie, in 2008. SmokingStogie quickly became one of the more influential cigar blogs on the internet, known for reviewing preproduction, prerelease, rare, extremely hard-to-find and expensive cigars, and it was one of the predecessors to halfwheel, which I co-founded.